This fragment of what was intended to be a five-part epic, published more than 60 years after its author died at Auschwitz, has been called the most important descriptive wartime writing since the diary of Anne Frank. Irène Némirovsky, born in Kiev in 1903, the daughter of a wealthy Jewish banker, escaped to Paris with her family after the Russian revolution and became the Françoise Sagan of her day. Suite Française, which describes the chaotic exodus of thousands from Paris after the arrival of the Germans in June 1940, certainly reads like an eyewitness account. It follows the flight to the countryside of five households, among them the wealthy Péricands, travelling in two cars with servants, bed linen, children's bicycles, cat and immaculately packed picnic basket; the Michauds, bank employees who should have had a lift in the manager's car had he not given their places to his mistress and her dog; and a sybaritic novelist, Gabriel Corte, driving through a logjam of laden, panic-stricken pedestrians and declaring: "If events as painful as defeat and mass exodus cannot be dignified with some sort of nobility, some grandeur, then they shouldn't happen at all."

Némirovsky, her husband and two daughters were part of this exodus. She began writing her last book in a Burgundy village until she was arrested and deported in 1942. I cannot imagine anyone reading this powerful, unsentimental and beautifully written story better than Eleanor Bron, especially the second half, about life in a French village under German occupation. It's more fictional but just as moving.

Maybe if I'd seen the film Wah-Wah, this record of its conception, obstetric glitches and five-year labour would have been more interesting. It came heavily recommended by film buffs, who said it was the sharpest, funniest take ever on the film industry. And if you like endless anecdotes about lunch with Ralph Fiennes and dinner with Mike Nichols, I dare say it is. I loved Withnail and I, but I couldn't give a toss about how it came to be filmed. Of course, if it's the first film you've written and directed, it's different. You're bound to treasure every email from Meg Ryan, every joke you shared with Anthony Hopkins, but are the banalities of where to park the generator truck and why the work permit application to the DCMS was a week late that riveting? Maybe I'm just jealous because I'm not a film star who has BA stewardesses on flights to Jo'burg whispering: "There's a spare flatbed in first class if you want to use it."